Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and
culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the
narrative mode of discourse-novels, films, television series-is losing
its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new
aesthetics of cyborg textuality? In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores
the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its
diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games,
computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts
such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of
electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, Aarseth situates
these literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature-a term
borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I
Ching or Apollinaire's calligrams, with which the reader must perform
specific actions to generate a literary sequence. Constructing a
theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms build on this
tradition, Aarseth bridges the widely assumed divide between paper texts
and electronic texts. He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics
to reexamine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and
to explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for
which they were not intended.